Friday, 23 August 2013

I woke up this this in my inbox... what do you think it means?!Dear Russia,

We need to talk.

I’m sorry that I have to do this in a blog post, but you forced my hand on this one. Anyone who has read my stuff knows that I write vividly gay characters, characters so gay that you’d be shitting rainbows for a month and craving Skittles at every meal. I’m also an historian, you know this, and you know I love reading about your Tsars and the whackjobs you allowed to rule you between 1917 and 1991.

No, Russia! Don’t cry – you still have a beautiful history…. No, wait, it’s full of anti-Semitism and dictatorship. Plus you’ve had your people under surveillance by varying forms of Secret Police since the early… was it the 500s or the 1500s? I can never remember, either way you hold the record for lack of trust in your own people!

Okay, so your language is pretty awesome – no, wait, when translated into English it becomes a Grammar Nazi’s worst nightmare. Well, it sounds beautiful. Some of your best music came from the period of the Great Patriot War! Remember Rasvitaly yabliny ee grushy from Katyusha? What about Malinka Kalinka? Oh, that’s right, both of those songs served as propaganda to promote Stalin’s ridiculous arms race against the United States.

I’ll be blunt with you: your anti-gay laws are throwing off historians and writers from other countries. How do you expect to go down in history as a democracy when you – a member state of the United Nations – are so casually revoking the basic rights of freedom from your own population? The militant skinheads of Occupy Paedophilia are by no means doing you any favours by publicising their attacks through the internet – it’s as though the Soviet Era has completely erased your sense of dignity!

Then again, I suppose this generation of Russians – as well as their forebears – have grown up under such strict surveillance as to make CCTV look like child’s play.

I’m sorry to have done this in writing, Russia, when I would so gladly have flown to Moscow and danced to YMCA while wearing rainbow spandex to break it off in person. You knew this was coming, Russia, when you passed those laws. History will not look upon you kindly.

Through dusk and dawn,Through liberty and wit,You have been dumped,Sincerely,The Rainbow Tit.

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

From concentration camps in Gone to the nuclear option in Fear,
the Gone series makes remarkable
parallels to the key events of eighteenth- to twentieth-century history
including but not limited to: pre-and-post-Revolutionary France, the Cold War
and the World Wars. The early days of the Fallout Alley Youth Zone (FAYZ) show
strong similarities to the French Revolution, coming to a close circle by the
events of Fear. The nuclear option is
an ever-present motif right from the beginning and will be used in reference to
the Cuban Missiles Crisis. To paraphrase
Lang, “every story written now is the product of its time – everything that happened
one hundred years ago is evident in a story written today.”

The Darkness can be taken as a substitute for a dictator
such as Hitler or Stalin. The FAYZ can be seen as a form of concentration camp
as it isolates children below the age of 15, comparable to Hitler’s treatment
of various groups during the Second World War. When Sam is looked upon as a
leader, it is a mirror of when the Allies were looked upon to bring the Axis
Powers to justice. However, Calder claims that the British war effort of ‘equality
of sacrifice’ was strong enough to unite and mobilise the nation in a British
Levee en Masse. Sam is put upon to be the leader, the one to sort out everything,
much like the Allies. By the end of Gone,
it is evident that some characters will be prejudiced towards others and this
will lead into situations comparable to some of the worst events in history.

With the exception of the Berlin Airlift, the events of Hunger can be used to demonstrate the
modern implications of rationing and capitalism as experienced in the 20th
Century on the modern generation or ‘the Golden Generation.’ Although Harold
MacMillan claimed that the Fifties “never had it so good” it might be argued
that the current, 21st-century world might be better than that of
the 1950s. Although unemployment was at a record low in 1950 when compared to
2010, by the latter decade the populations of Britain and America experienced more
civil liberties. The addition of currency by Albert Hillsborough also rules out
the possibility of the FAYZ becoming a Communist regime – this may be due to
the fact that the author is American, and some historians suggest that
Americans are raised with an innate sense of caution toward the possibility of
Communism, particularly those who grew up during the Cold War – which plays on “carrot
and stick” psychology in Sam and Co.’s attempts to get kids to work.

By the end of Lies
Astrid has taken on the role of social pariah, her only saving grace being her
decision to finally create a code of conduct within the FAYZ; the preceding
debate leading up to this is similar to that of the Norway Debate, which
Paananen argues was an integral moment in the early days of the Second World
War because it triggered Hitler’s invasion of Scandinavia. In a similar vein, Sir William Beveridge
delivered the Beveridge Report in 1942, although this was generally
well-received and he was much admired for his recommendations in stark contrast
to Astrid who did not experience such a reception. The historian Addison
criticised Beveridge for his lack of economic pragmatism in excluding the
elderly, of whom there were more and more in Britain with each succeeding year;
this is a parallel one could draw with the Gone
series due to the absence of adults. One could even go as far as to argue that Lies foreshadows the discovery of King
Richard III’s skeleton insofar that Brittney’s power of regeneration kept the
debate alive.

The events of Plague
bear an obvious reminiscence to the Black Death experienced by Europe during from
Middle Ages through to the eighteenth century, although the nature of waste
disposal is starkly akin to the slum conditions of early C-20 Britain and
America. It is also in Plague where
we see the use of biological warfare by the Darkness; this is in the form of ‘greenies.’
It could be said that this is a physical realisation of the use of smallpox and
anthrax by the Soviet government during the Cold War, but given that ‘greenies’
dismember their prey and behave in a similar manner to parasites, this is
unlikely.

Finally, Fear is the ultimate in the democracy versus dictatorship debate
which is reminiscent of pre-Revolutionary France. Caine Soren’s monarchical
reign is similar to that of Louis XVI before the French Revolution of 1789, so
it is not surprising when Penny exacts her revenge toward the end of the story
with no one intervening to save him in a surprisingly similar manner to the
Terror. Sam Temple, however, runs the closest possible regime to a democracy. One
might even call it ‘Communism’ but for the fact that currency and democratic external
trade (i.e. between Lake Tramonto and Perdido Beach) exists on this basis. The Levee
en Masse is realised through the birth of the Gaiaphage as the kids unite to
overthrow her, but fast forward 173 years into the future to 1962, and by the
end of Fear the Cuban Missiles Crisis
is evident as the FAYZ Wall is nuked to oblivion and the kids look out hopefully into the world they thought they would never know again.